THE KEYS TO MANAGING AN EFFECTIVE PPC CLIENT ENGAGEMENT. Five Essential Areas of Pay-Per-Click Alignment for Marketing Services Agencies

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1 1 THE KEYS TO MANAGING AN EFFECTIVE PPC CLIENT ENGAGEMENT Five Essential Areas of Pay-Per-Click Alignment for Marketing Services Agencies K A Publication of HubSpot s Partner Program

2 2 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Before joining the marketing team at HubSpot, Matthew Wainwright worked at SEO agency Catalyst Online specializing in PPC and Content Strategy. Prior to that, he worked at Compete Inc. while obtaining an MBA from Boston University. Matthew specializes in using online analytics to tell a story and develop business

3 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION / 5 AGREE ON TOFU / 7 KNOW THEIR DIGITAL ASSETS / 8 ALIGN GOALS & BUDGET / 9 PRESSURE TEST MESSAGGING / 10 KNOW THEIR NOT-YET CUSTOMERS / 11 MORE RESOURCES / 12

4 INTRODUCTION

5 5 As an agency that offers paid search marketing (PPC) services, you need to be sure that your efforts are strongly aligned with your client s business needs. A well-thought-out PPC campaign also provides the chance to show your alignment with their marketing messaging, sales funnel and sales process and use of their digital assets (both pre-existing and what you may have created). With the right technology in place, you can also better optimize their top-of-the-funnel efforts and, of course, the economics around their key marketing initiatives. If you live and breathe PPC, you understand the importance of campaign structure. A well-structured campaign allows you to quickly optimize around key performance metrics like from click-though-rate (CTR) to cost-ofcustomer-acquisition (COCA). Meanwhile, a well-structured campaign will also ensure that you aide Google in its mission to provide users with paid search results that are just as relevant as the organic results. Remember, if your ad shows up when a user searches for apples and the associated landing page is about oranges, Google will punish you by lowering your Quality Score and raising your costs You know this, of course, but your client doesn t. The accompanying PPC template (the second part of this kit) will help you educate your client on what a well-structured PPC campaign looks like, and how it fits into their business needs.

6 6 AGENCY PPC KEYS

7 7 1 AGREE ON THE TOP OF THE FUNNEL It s important that your client understands the risk and reward of using PPC to target and extract value from the top-of-the-funnel (TOFU). You can score some quick wins by showing them their competitors presence on these keywords they share or, if they aren t there, you can make the case for putting them ahead of the curve. But it s easy for your client to lose faith in this strategy. They may take a quick glance at their Google Analytics, or another last-click attribution analytics tool, and conclude that their branded or bottom-of-thefunnel campaigns are driving all of their PPC ROI. The key here is having the right analytics tools in place. IP-based analytics tools, like HubSpot, can help you attribute that conversion and resulting ROI to whatever campaign first brought them to the site. Because TOFU is typically uncharted territory, you re bound to have some duds. Use this template to show your client that you are entering this territory with a diversified approach. If the apples TOFU campaign shows no ROI, while the oranges campaign proves successful, you ll be poised to make some quick changes. More importantly, your client will know this as well.

8 8 2 KNOW THEIR DIGITAL ASSETS BY HEART You know inbound marketing, so we won t bother explaining the importance of having offers and digital assets that align with the different stages of the sales funnel. You get it. But while many clients probably have pre-existing digital assets like whitepapers and on-demand videos, others won t have anything beyond a Contact Us page. Driving PPC traffic to that Contact Us page or, worse, the home page is a waste of resources. F This template should help your client connect the dots between getting traffic from a research-oriented keyword, and having an early stage research offer or d i g i t a l a s s e t w a i t i n g f o r t h e m. Simultaneously, you ll show them that you re still dedicated to that bottom-of-thefunnel activity with an ad campaign built exclusively around branded terms.

9 9 3 ALIGN BUSINESS GOALS WITH BUDGET Dollar and cents? More like the dollars need to make sense. Too many clients treat too many marketing elements as line item expenditures and PPC is no exception. However, a well-structured PPC campaign should be viewed as a diversified investment in the client s business. Much like a mutual fund, you should be able to maximize your client s ROI by divesting in underperforming campaigns and reinvesting in the winners. As the data bakes -- again, preferably collected by an IP-based analytics tool like HubSpot -- you should periodically review how your spend on each campaign. While this template does not calculate budget and spend efficiencies, it can help stimulate an important conversation with your client: you re not complicating the process to justify your retainer, but rather taking the steps necessary to properly set up a sophisticated lead generation initiative. z

10 10 4 PRESSURE TEST THEIR MESSAGING Unless you re working with a startup, your client is likely to have some equity to their brand and existing marketing messaging. This can be a touchy subject that sometimes doesn t manifest itself until several weeks after the ink on the contract has dried. When it does, agencies may find themselves woefully bound to an ineffective message. But PPC offers a relatively inoffensive way for you to challenge that messaging and A/B (or C) test it against your own ideas. q Use the attached campaign template to show your client that PPC vendors like AdWords will allow you to submit and rotate multiple ads within an ad group. Show them that if anyone enters any of these keywords, any one of the these ads will show. The ad with the highest CTR may contain the best language. Whatever the results, it s bound to stimulate conversation based on objective, tangible data.

11 11 5 KNOW THEIR NOT-YET CUSTOMERS Even the brightest clients can be surprisingly insular in terms of how they think about their products. They will tell you that because their best customers know all the industry terms-of-art and jargon, that it s imperative you spend as much money as possible to get them showing for those keywords regardless of where that campaign is in the funnel. Often, they fail to understand that even the most educated prospects may be more casual in their online research at the outset. Or, they may actually delegate that research to a lesseducated or experienced junior employee. If the client insists on going after these keywords aggressively, show them that you can include these keywords as part of an existing campaign. Or better yet, create a new campaign to drive traffic to that same offer comprised entirely of the keywords that the clients insist upon. As you remember from the marketing messaging section, this tactic can later provide you with concrete, tangible data to guide your client conversations. U

12 12 MORE RESOURCES / HUBSPOT Our Channel Account Managers help hundreds of agencies master the Four Core Service Offerings to become Inbound Agencies and, ultimately, earn more retainer clients and grow their business. Request a Strategic Consultation to Learn how Inbound can help your agency grow.

13 13 A Publication of HubSpot s Partner Program